Public Policy and Governance – Page 127

Trust Tells Us A Lot

As our social distancing drags on, researchers have been investigating the effects on social solidarity–how Americans view each other, and especially, any changes in the level of “social trust.” In this context, social trust is an indicator of what sociologists and political scientists call social capital.

The bad news is that, thanks to the ineptitude and constant and pathetically obvious lies from the Trump administration, trust in the federal government is very low. (Recent example: Israeli news reports revealed that U.S. Intelligence told Israel and NATO in November about the threat posed by the coronavirus– contradicting Pentagon claims that no such report existed.)

The good news is that a couple of recent surveys have found improvement in the way Americans view each other. In that sense, it’s reminiscent of the change in attitudes triggered by the Great Depression. Suddenly, the very American (and arguably Calvinist) view that people are poor because they are morally defective–lazy or unmotivated–was replaced by recognition that poverty is largely a social phenomenon. (If there are no jobs, its harder to blame people for not having them.)

Social capital is the label we give to our memberships in social networks–the human relationships within which we are embedded. Trust is an important component of social capital–but so is reciprocity. Scholars define social capital as the institutionalized expectation that other people will reciprocate co-operative behaviors–the recognition that If we fail to work together when collective efforts are needed, we all become poorer.

There are two kinds of social capital: bonding and bridging. Bonding social capital is possible only with shared identity (however identity is defined). It’s at the heart of tribalism: “I belong to this group, and I look with suspicion/disdain at those who don’t.” Bridging social capital, which has been in short supply recently, links people across cleavages that typically divide us (race, class, or religion). Its associations create ‘bridges’ between communities.

The surveys that suggest a growth in “generalized social trust” are encouraging because they hold out the hope that America may be restoring some of its lost bridging social capital.

I was reminded of the importance of trust and bridging social capital when I was cleaning out cabinets in my home office. (I don’t know how other people cope, but stress tends to turn me into a maniacal cleaning machine.) I came across a reprint of “SPEA Insights” –a PR publication we used to put out, highlighting faculty research. This one was from July of 2010; titled “Trust Me, Said the Spider,” it was focused on the then-recent publication of my book Distrust, American Style.

In it, I pointed out that trust in social institutions–especially but not exclusively government–is absolutely essential to contemporary life.

Think about it. We deposit our paychecks and take for granted that the funds will be there when we need to draw them out; we pay the electric bill and expect the lights to turn on when we throw the switch; we order a gizmo from Amazon or other Internet merchant and are confident the gizmo will be delivered. We go to our local grocery and buy a chicken, confident that we won’t have to individually test it for e coli when we get home.

On and on….

And–as I argued in that paper– Americans rely on government to ensure that our water is drinkable, our air breathable, our aircraft flyable, and so much more.

I was particularly struck by my own words from 2010:

“And when we go through a period when government is inept or corrupt, that confidence is shaken–but our skepticism and distrust affect more than just the political system. Trust in government sets the tone for confidence in all social institutions….From time to time, America goes through periods where the failures of our civic and governing institutions are so manifest that awareness of them is simply inescapable. In the era of the Internet, the amount of information received by even the most “low information” voters has been enormously amplified. When I wrote Distrrust, the American public was positively marinating in news of corruption and incompetence.”

That was 2010. Ten years ago. I’d say we’re pretty thoroughly marinated now.

The last sentence of that essay is truer today than ever, in the wake of this pandemic: “our first order of business must be the restoration of transparency, accountability and trustworthiness of our government.”

No kidding.

Comments

Then There’s Monsanto…..

It isn’t just the Trump administration that is thoroughly corrupt. In fact, it’s hard not to see Trump’s collection of mob wanna-be’s and hangers-on as representative of far too many American mega-corporations.

Take Monsanto. (As Henny Youngman might have said, please…)

A while back, the Guardian published an expose–one of many–that confirmed what farmers and rural folks have known for years, namely, that the company is rapacious, dishonest and immoral.

The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

And in some of the internal emails, employees appear to joke about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail”.

Think about that last paragraph for a while.

The Guardian investigation focused on a product intended to replace Roundup–the company’s best-selling herbicide that has been connected to various cancers. Not that concern about user’s health entered into the equation. It seems that millions of acres of US farmland have become overrun with weeds that have become resistant to Roundup, the company’s name for glyphosate.

Farmers using Roundup would spray it on crops that Monsanto had genetically engineered to survive being sprayed with glyphosate. That was popular with farmers everywhere, not just in the U.S., but it led to the emergence of weeds that were also resistant to Roundup. The new system promoted by Monsanto and BASF uses a herbicide called dicamba; it “similarly provides farmers with genetically engineered dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton that can be sprayed directly with dicamba.” The weeds sprayed with the new product die–at least, so far– but the crops don’t.

There is, it appears, a down-side to the new product (other than the consequences of such herbicide use generally).

Dicamba has been in use since the 1960s but traditionally was used sparingly, and not on growing crops, because it has a track record of volatilizing – moving far from where it is sprayed – particularly in warm growing months. As it moves it can damage or kill the plants it drifts across.

The companies said they would make new dicamba formulations that would stay where they were sprayed and would not volatilize as older versions of dicamba were believed to do. With good training, special nozzles, buffer zones and other “stewardship” practices, the companies assured regulators and farmers that the new system would bring “really good farmer-friendly formulations to the marketplace”.

You can guess the rest. Only farmers buying Monsanto’s own dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean seeds would be protected from drift damage. And they knew it. According to a report prepared for Monsanto in 2009, such “off-target movement” was expected, along with “crop loss”, “lawsuits” and “negative press around pesticides.” Monsanto’s own projections estimated that damage claims from farmers would total more than 10,000 cases. Evidently, those anticipated lawsuits were just a cost of doing business–business that generated enough profit to make even significant losses quite manageable.

And of course, one way Monsanto generated profit and business was through the drift–which encouraged the “drifted on” farmers to buy Monsanto’s resistant seeds.

It’s Roundup all over again.

Three juries so far have found that Roundup is carcinogenic and that Monsanto hid the risks. And just as Monsanto has done in the Roundup cases, it has tried to keep most of the discovery from the dicamba litigation designated confidential. According to the Guardian, some 180 of those documents have been unsealed.

“The documents are the worst that I’ve ever seen for any case that I’ve worked on,” said lawyer Angie Splittgerber, a former tobacco industry defense attorney who works with Randles in the firm Randles & Splittgerber. “So many of them put things in writing that were just horrifying.”

The linked article has facts and figures and is worth reading in its entirety–not just because Monsanto’s behavior has been utterly despicable for many years, but because lax government oversight has allowed a number of companies to behave with similar impunity. Too many of America’s “movers and shakers” consider this kind of behavior “doing business.”

Capitalism requires effective regulation in order to work properly. This is what happens when the regulated capture and control the regulators.

This is the cesspool from which Trump and his enablers emerged. This is their “normal.”

Comments

Don’t Let A Crisis Go To Waste…A Grifter’s Perspective…

Usually, when a politician says “don’t let a crisis go to waste,” the meaning is: “let’s take advantage of this crisis to move policy in the direction we think it should go.” It implies recognition that crises are often opportunities for positive change.

A report from NBC News is a reminder that not letting a crisis go to waste means something rather different to folks whose only goal is to make a profit–and that we have a federal administration just chock-full of grifters who think that way

It seems that, as the country hunkered down, DuPont convened a crisis team, charged with figuring out how to increase production of personal protective equipment (PPE). DuPont has a patented material called Tyvek, which its distributors sell between $5 to $15 apiece to hospitals, and according to NBC, by early March, DuPont’s factory in Richmond, Virginia, was cranking out Tyvek.

In non-crisis times, it can take up to three months to turn Tyvek into body suits, because DuPont usually ships the fabric to Vietnam, where the body suits are sewn. So when the federal government offered to pay for chartered flights to reduce the round trip for 750,000 items to 10 days, DuPont agreed.

Then DuPont sold the suits to a third-party distributor for approximately $4 each, according to company documents it provided to NBC News, and that distributor sold them to the government. The company initially declined to say how much the Department of Health and Human Services paid for 750,000 suits, and it refused to identify the third-party distributor or say how much that firm charged the federal government.

“We actually helped get raw materials supplied from Richmond, Virginia, and we flew that s— to Vietnam, all so that DuPont could sell us” their products, said a senior federal official involved in the coronavirus effort.

Trump, of course, bragged that the deal was evidence of his administration’s excellent efforts to provide PPE.

NBC–and a number of government insiders–have a different view.

[F]or some government officials familiar with the supply-chain end of the coronavirus fight, it was yet another example of Trump’s task force serving industry as the White House tried to corner the market on medical supplies.

For weeks, Trump has resisted pressure to use the full power of his office to temporarily turn the private sector into an arm of the federal government in a national emergency. He and his lieutenants instead have used the crisis to make federal assets and personnel a support group for industry, rather than the other way around, according to NBC News’ interviews with dozens of public- and private-sector sources involved in various aspects of the coronavirus response.

In doing so, the vice president’s coronavirus task force — mostly through a supply-chain unit led by Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, vice director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and heavily influenced by White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — has favored some of the nation’s largest corporations and ignored smaller producers of goods and services with long track records of meeting emergency needs, according to officials at multiple federal agencies and people familiar with contracting.

They have operated almost entirely in the dark, releasing few details of their arrangements with the big companies; created a new and convoluted emergency response system; and sown confusion and distrust in the states and among the people who need medical supplies.

The supply-chain group is just one part of the task force run by Vice President Mike Pence. That task force is routinely described by insiders as chaotic, secretive and inept. According to the NBC report (and numerous others, including Governors, local officials and veterans of federal emergency response), it has deeply complicated the national fight against the pandemic.

We don’t know much, because transparency is clearly not a priority of this administration; however, there are two priorities that–according to off-the-record officials–definitely remain: private profit and the ability of the White House to choose where supplies go.

A friend of mine used to say that the whole point of holding political office was to help your friends and screw your enemies. Whatever the truth of that cynical maxim, it may be the only political principle guiding the know-nothing grifters in this administration…

Comments

A Follow-Up

Yesterday’s post was about Gavin Newsom’s challenge to Washington, and what it might mean for federalism, and for the divisions–both philosophical and partisan–between the more thinly-populated Red states (most of which are also “taker” states) and more urbanized Blue states (mostly “donors.”)

The Guardian also addressed the federalism issue, albeit from a different angle.The Guardian looked at the effect of Trump’s ego and behavior, focusing especially on Trump’s clear resentment of Puerto Rico after its hurricane, and–in the midst of the pandemic–his unmistakable message that he would be more likely to send needed medical supplies to states whose governors treated him “with appreciation.”

Clashes between presidents and states are nothing new. But according to government theorists, public affairs experts and political analysts, Trump’s rattling of the federalist compact, by which the 50 states are both autonomous and bound in a national union, is unprecedented in modern times.

“You’ve redefined the role of state governors,” said David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law. “Governors must grovel to the president. Governor [Gavin] Newsom [of California], Governor Andrew Cuomo [of New York] have understood that, and they’re doing it. Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer has largely refused, and Michigan is going through hell as a result.

“These governors are more like provincial chiefs under this system, and if we want to restore federalism in this country we will have to make some very dramatic changes after this is over. If we don’t, federalism is dead.”

Super calls the White House approach to the nation’s governors “flippant federalism.” And along with many other observers, he conveyed shock and concern over reports that the federal government is intercepting ventilators and other equipment ordered and paid for by the states, which Trump appears to be handing out on a political patronage basis.

“On the one hand, they’re telling the states they’re on their own,” said Super. “On the other, they’re seizing the supplies that the states get on their own.”

Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland has called the administration’s approach “Darwinian federalism.”

“His [Trump’s] behavior is not in keeping with the office of president,” O’Malley told the Guardian in an email. “The notion that governors have to bow down and praise him in order for their citizens to receive federal disaster assistance is contrary to the very nature of a republic.”

In the wake of this pandemic, what happens to federalism, to democracy, to government legitimacy, to partisan polarization, the social safety net– are all open questions.

Every newscast, every performance, practically every Facebook post ends with “We’ll get through this– together.” I hope that’s true, but I’m not so sure.

One thing I am sure of, however, and that is the importance of trust in a society’s institutions, based upon a belief that those institutions and structures are fair. Right now, Americans don’t have that belief and that trust.

Much as I detest Donald Trump and the know-nothings and predatory bigots he’s assembled, he’s not the cause of the multiple failures of governance we’re experiencing. He’s the pathetic result of years of civic apathy.

Our national motto was not originally “In God We Trust.” It was e pluribus unum–out of the many, one. The existential question we face is whether we can breathe new life into that motto–if we can use this horrible time to recommit ourselves to the values that once did make this country exceptional (although probably not in the way the nationalists believe).

Federalism isn’t the only institution we have to repair.

Comments

A New Nation-State

Apologies for yesterday’s accidental post-that-wasn’t. I clearly don’t do stir-crazy very well….

_________________________

Should the GOP manage to manipulate–rig– the 2020 election and somehow re-elect Trump–maybe I won’t have to move into my son’s house in Amsterdam, or go to Canada, which have been my choices so far.

Maybe I can just move to California. which Governor Gavin Newsom has begun referring to as a “Nation-State.”

California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

“Nation-state.” “Export.”

(Newsom’s “Nation-State” differs from what Mike Bloomberg and others have referred to as “the rise of City-States” in response to climate change.)

In what the quoted article calls “civil war by other means,” Newsom is sending a message, not to Trump (who lacks the intellect to decode communications in any event), but to both political parties.

The GOP has been waging war on democratic values, institutions and laws for a number of years. The Democrats have been playing defense (and arguably not very well).

The GOP’s politicization of the Supreme Court most recently led to the unconscionable ruling requiring Wisconsin voters to risk their lives in order to cast a vote. Despite the fact that Wisconsin voters took that risk, that should have been a wake-up call.

Perhaps it was.

It’s clearly past time for Democrats to go on the offensive. Newsom is Governor of the nation’s largest state; he’s in a position to put Republicans on notice. California’s taxpayers account for 15% of individual contributions to the U.S. Treasury, and the article suggests the state is is “now toning up at muscle beach.”

Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, a leader in California’s cumbersome efforts to produce more housing, said soon after Newsom took office in 2019 that reorienting the state’s relationship to Washington is a necessity, not a choice.

“The federal government is no longer a reliable partner in delivering health care, in supporting immigrants, supporting LGBT people, in protecting the environment, so we need to forge our own path,” Wiener said. “We can do everything in our power to protect our state, but we need a reliable federal partner. And right now we don’t have that.”

And that quote was from before the federal government’s multiple failures to respond adequately to the pandemic.

Federalism has a number of virtues; as we saw in the 50s and 60s, however, “state’s rights” can also facilitate gross injustices. Its current operation is among the many governing structures we need to rethink and reorient–but that reorientation, along with all the other institutional “fixes” we need–will have to await the installation of a competent federal administration.

Meanwhile, states like California are increasingly at odds with the Republican playbook: California is a sanctuary state while Trump’s GOP is demonizing immigrants; its approach to marijuana is much more permissive than that of the feds; its position on guns is diametrically opposed to that of an administration co-opted by the NRA. Etc. Now, Trump’s dangerous mismanagement of pandemic response has essentially left California and other states to manage on their own.

One conflict, however, encompasses all others, and could galvanize Californians into new ways of thinking about their state and its relationship to Washington. The GOP war on democracy is inspired by a drive for racial and cultural supremacy that jeopardizes the democratic aspirations and human rights of California’s multiracial citizenry.

It isn’t only California. The majority of citizens in our diverse nation live in urban areas and urbanized states, while the White Supremacy Party–aka GOP–is increasingly a rural phenomenon. The states with a majority of the country’s population are under-represented in the Senate; their citizens’ votes are minimized by the Electoral College and gerrymandering. There’s no reason to believe that these continuing inequities of minority rule won’t trigger a counterattack–and good reason to believe they will.

As the editorial concludes:

John C. Calhoun, who used the theory of states’ rights to defend the institution of slavery, is not generally a philosophical lodestar for liberal Democrats such as Newsom. But if Republicans (or foreign friends) succeed in sabotaging democracy in November, Calhoun’s theory of nullification, which posited that states have the power to defy federal law, could be ripe for a comeback on the left coast. With the heirs of the Confederacy now reigning in Washington, turnabout might be very fair play.

Comments